Groovy drums are crucial to pretty much any song that has drums in it. While authentic groovy drumming only can be achieved by a real groovy drummer, there are certain things you can do in the mixing process to help shake things up a bit. Especially for programmed drums and samples, these techniques can be...
Have you ever mixed a song and whatever you did, you weren’t happy with the drums? Not just slightly unhappy… There was something wrong that you couldn’t sort out with EQ and compression. Maybe the kick drum didn’t cut it. Or the snare was just not heavy enough. Instead of tweaking the mix for hours...
The Drum Mix Toolkit is 40% off until tomorrow because of my early Black Friday sale. I wanted to use this opportunity to give the top ten most important things you’ll learn from the Drum Mix Toolkit. If you already know all of these things, cool. You might not need the Toolkit. But if you...
This last week I’ve been working on a few different mixes. One was a hard-hitting stoner-punk song like QOTSA meets Rancid. The second was a spacious country ballad like old-school country meets Norah Jones. You wouldn’t believe how differently I processed these mixes, especially when it came to the drums. For the stoner-punk song: Drum...
Multi-band compression is a great tool to understand. It can really help shape the sound of your mixes and it comes in handy when the full-band compressor sounds too heavy-handed on a track. What follows is an excerpt from my Drum Mix Toolkit that teaches you how to use the multiband compressor on drums. How...
A common drum mixing problem is dealing with the snare getting buried in the mix. There’s that thin line you have to find that sits somewhere between being “buried in the mix” and then sounding like it’s “on top of the mix.” Sometimes you can fix this problem the mix, but I have an alternative...
This week’s One Minute EQ Trick is one I do often. I like meaty snare drums so I tend to go hunting down in the low-mids for some extra power. I like using the Waves V-EQ for this purpose for some reason but in the video below I show you using the simple Logic Channel...
Mixing drums is one of the hardest things you do in your mix. But it’s crucial to get it right because a tight drum sound is one of the most important elements of creating a solid foundation in your mix. A weak drum sound kills the rest of the mix and makes everything else suffer....